So, by now, everyone has seen the Dr. Pepper TEN ads where some guy in a guy cliché talks about how women just can’t understand Dr. Pepper and how awesome it is to be a man and understand why Dr. Pepper is the shit. Understandably, this ruffled a few feathers.

I was going to write a long post about the difficulty in altering the course of social intertia and how, like with most forms of social prejudice, jokes like this are really not okay regardless of intention because of the way advertising and exposure keeps already ingrained ideas more firmly ingrained.

And then I saw this other commercial, and decided I didn’t need to write anything. This, right here (or the attitude contained therein), is why Dr. Pepper thought their ad direction was just fine.

Obviously, the ad agency and Progresso thinks that they’re tapping into a socially-ingrained fear of American woman. They’re probably right. Still doesn’t make it okay.

Like this:

So Mega Man fans of various kinds have been making a big on-going Internet fuss over how Mega Man wasn’t featured in the various versions of Marvel vs Capcom 3 despite having been in Marvel vs Capcom 2, one of Capcom’s most iconic characters, best franchise, yada, yada, yada.

So Capcom decided to add Mega Man to the cast of Street Fighter X Tekken. Just not the Mega Man fans expected.

Like this:

From a game design standpoint, the Uncharted games are not the greatest games in the world. It’s gameplay has been done better elsewhere, in the likes of Assassin’s Creed and action-shooter hybrids like Mass Effect and Gears of War. It’s not even the most seemless action-gaming experience like God of War.

And yet, Uncharted 3, just like the two previous iterations, is one of the most fun, rewarding action-gaming experiences I’ve ever had whose actual enjoyment blasts it past most of those previously mentioned games as an overall experience.Read more…

Like this:

Okay, so the same people behind the awesome ‘Splosion Man just came out with their first Kinect game, the Gunstringer. It’s a goofy, totally cheesed-out rail shooter based on Wild West marionette shows…no, really, that’s what it is. With your left hand, you control the movement of the puppet, the titular main character, and with your right, you aim and make shooting motions to shoot.

Look, I grant that I love the art. The fire in the eyes, the wild hair, the action shot, the stylized (if a bit silly) armor, the use of the tech arm, it’s awesome looking!

But seriously, EA, congrats, you played your audience like a fiddle. The design you wanted won out, and you drummed up a month of serious internet juice all focused on your highly anticipated (but unfortunately delayed) blockbuster game. While I’m sure that no one in the office automatically assumed that the heavily researched default design in the original game would win out, I’ll bet there’s more than a little backslapping going on for successfully re-confirming design choices made back in 2005.

I am totally cool with the idea of FB voting for this kind of thing (since 75% of the players are going to re-design their Shepard, anyway), but this is really starting to feel like they didn’t have this one planned out that well (or, for the conspiracy theorists, planned it just well enough to get folks to choose the one they wanted anyways ;P ). Granted, at this point in the process, there’s not a lot of good financial reasons to get more scientific than they need to be, but am I the only one who thinks that the re-color job on the art just looks kind of bad in the larger images?

Of course, I’m also in the extreme minority who thinks that EA should offer a just-in-time premium printing version of the box art where people can pay an additional $75 to get a picture of their own Shepard from ME2 on their ME3 box art.

Like this:

In light of all the brouhaha (which actually has an officially correct spelling, #thingsyoulearn) and counter-haha over the female version of Shepard being voted on as alternate Mass Effect 3 box art (not sure what was wrong with the original default design, but w/e), there’s something that’s been tickling in the back of head for a while now:

Now, not everyone uses the same philosophy when creating a game avatar, but I suspect many people like creating creators that are at least somewhat based on themselves, and wouldn’t it be a cool option to have?

Like this:

For you NYC-area game industry folks, it has just been announced that Avalanche Studios, developers of the Just Cause games released by Square-Enix, will be opening a studio this fall in New York City. Though exact physical details have yet to be released to the public, they are already looking to hire talented new folks with experience in AAA development environments to staff the new location.